Purple means something special to me – it was my mother’s favorite color. I can remember picking wild violets in our yard, bringing them in to her when I was small, proudly adding a splash of the color to her day. She especially liked deep purples, but she also loved lavender and lilacs. And she loved the purples of Scotland – the mountains, and the thistle tops, and the color of the heather on Scottish hillsides. And amethysts – amethysts were her favorite stone.

In England, her favorite place was Hampton Court Palace. The favorite palace of Henry VIII, its gardens are fabulous, and laced with purple flowers.

As I walked outside this morning, I paused to take these shots of the delicate purple blossoms on one of my Rose of Sharon trees. A gentle, comforting reminder of Mum.

That’s my purple haze. To see what other bloggers posted for this challenge, click here.

Hampton Court Palace was one of my favourite places too. I love the Wisteria photo you’ve put as your header. I wish we could grow it here, but sadly it’s yet another on the list Calgary’s not-a-chance-of-growing here plants.

Calgary is ‘special’ in gardening terms because although we can be cold during the winter, we also get Chinooks where we can go from -20C to +10C in the space of two hours. In addition we don’t normally get tons of snow so there’s no insulation when that happens. We’ll suddenly lose perennials that we’ve had for years. This year I even lost an Iris – that was a first!

Gorgeous blooms. Love the Rose of Sharon ones. I have only seen them in red and white. The purple is lovely. My mom always had big purple irises in the spring. Amazing how colors bring about precious memories. 🙂

And also, wanted to check which plug in you used for the “Like” for the blog? I have a self-hosted site too, and have had a few comments to add this feature, but the ones I saw had not been updated in a quite a while.

I’m not really self-hosted, I just own the domain name I use on WordPress. I used the WordPress dashboard (Settings-Sharing-last item on the page) for the Like button – The Facebook Like is a Widget on this theme. Hope that helps.